The film version of what is probably Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, is released in Britain this weekend on the back of a marketing push that seeks to capitalise on the English love for nostalgia, with its grand houses, 'heritage' actors (in this case Emma Thompson playing the redoubtable Lady Marchmain) and beautiful young things in vintage clothing. American critics were less than impressed by the film, which is unfair. While no classic, it works perfectly well on its own terms as an entertaining, intelligent costume drama of a decidedly traditional nature. The most regrettable excision is most of the humour; you could watch it with no idea that Waugh is considered a great comic writer.

Nonetheless, what it will fail to do is to erase memories of the seminal 1981 TV series. This has always been one of the most famous pieces of television ever produced, due to its glittering cast (the likes of Gielgud , Olivier and a then-unknown Jeremy Irons) and the way in which it adapted the book with scrupulous fidelity. Graham Lord's biography since revealed that the credited screenwriter, John Mortimer, was replaced with a virtual transcript of the novel, with huge swathes of Waugh's narration delivered verbatim by Irons' alternately naïve and world-weary Charles Ryder.

For my money, Brideshead is about halfway down Waugh's achievements, undeniably better than the likes of Helena and the Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, but lacking the sprightly wit and satirical thrust of, say, Scoop or Decline and Fall. Nevertheless, its globe-trotting grandiosity and what Waugh himself called "a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language" make it a natural choice for adaptation.

In this regard, it fares better than many of the previous films made from his novels. Stephen Fry's recent Bright Young Things, an adaptation of Vile Bodies, suffered from a distracting overload of cameo casting which all but overwhelmed the promising young actors (David Tennant, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen) at its centre. Charles Sturridge's 1988 version of A Handful Of Dust misses the novel's point by transforming the duplicitous Brenda Last and loathsome John Beaver into star-crossed lovers, and the wronged Tony Last into an ineffectual buffoon. Earlier films were no better; a strange, pointless version of Decline and Fall added the words "of a Birdwatcher" to the title, as if this was likely to get ornithologists flocking to the cinema. The Terry Southern-scripted adaptation of The Loved One is more notable today for its cast of kitsch icons, including Liberace and Tad Hunter, than for its heavy-handed literalisation of Waugh's ironic fable.

Conversely, Waugh is a writer who has been relatively well served by TV; this is ironic, as it was a medium he despised, as a memorably ill-tempered interview on Face To Face once demonstrated. In addition to the seminal adaptation of Brideshead, William Boyd scripted two intelligent, faithful adaptations of Sword of Honour (starring a pre-Bond Daniel Craig) and Scoop, both of which took the time to present Waugh's warped world to an unsuspecting audience, and to stick with reasonable fidelity to his more extreme characters. Waugh was also a prolific short story writer, and a recent adaptation of his black comic tale Mr Loveday's Little Outing was highly successful.

It may be the case that Waugh is unsuited to cinema adaptation, with his greatest strength - his economical but devastatingly witty prose style - untranslatable from page to screen. However, I still have hopes that one day there will be a proper adaptation of Decline And Fall. It is worth noting in passing that the younger Waugh was a huge cinema fan, adopting the early techniques of montage and cross-cutting to literary ends, most notably in Vile Bodies. And, while he was still up at Oxford, he appeared in the undergraduate film The Scarlet Woman. This amusing curio, which can be viewed at the excellent BFI Southbank Mediatheque, features a frightwigged Waugh in a dual role as the Dean of Balliol and Lord Borrowington. While it's a performance with plenty of camp gusto, it's fair to say that the thespian world's loss was literature's gain.